The NBA is now a League for Pansies

(Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)

Growing up during the period of time when Michael Jordan was at his best in the late 80's and early 90's, plenty of fans were able to see the true toughness of NBA players.

At the time, the "bad boys" era in Detroit, and of course the always physical New York Knicks teams under Pat Riley, were in full force and an argument can be made that time frame from the late 80's to the early 90's was the best the NBA had to offer.

The league back then was much more physical. Easy baskets didn't come as easily, and if there was a foul, the player was going to feel it, unlike today's game, where there's ticky-tack foul after ticky-tack foul being called.

During the '80s and up to the early '90s, there weren't any players flopping around. Players like Anderson Varejao would not have survived.

In today's game, thanks mostly to David Stern, the league has become filled with ticky-tack fouls, especially the fouls that seem to favor the big named players in the league.

Even hard fouls that in the late '80s and early '90s would have just been called fouls are now flagrant fouls.

When was the last time a player took a hard foul on Kobe Bryant? Dwyane Wade? LeBron James? The answer is: very rarely, but back in the late '80s and early '90s, hard fouls were a relative norm; pretty much no team wanted to give up an easy basket.

Here's an example of a flagrant foul in today's game, but earlier on, that would have just been a hard frustration foul by Raja Bell. Again, Stern is to blame for this.

Here's another example of a technical foul on Karl Malone, that if it was at any other time period, but this one would have just been a foul call. Malone elbows Steve Nash

How about another flagrant foul that done mostly by acting by the aforementioned Nash. Nash's boneheaded move costs Suns

This happened even more recently with Glen Davis fouling Varejao and Trevor Ariza's foul on Rudy Fernandez. Both were hard fouls, but both were not flagrant and did not deserve ejection.

The funny thing is after the Ariza flagrant Portland Trail Blazer fans were calling Ariza a "thug". When all Ariza did was make a play on the ball it was the way that Fernandez went up that caused it too look worse than it actually was.

In the 2008 playoffs, Jason Kidd was ejected for a hard foul on Jannero Pargo, even though Kidd was going for the ball and got mostly ball and with his off hand got Pargo's face. Another joke of a flagrant call

Let's take a look at some flagrant fouls from back in the time that keeps being referred to.

Kevin McHale takes out Kurt Rambis and what was the call? Just a hard foul; there were no flagrants back then, but McHale could have been ejected for it.

If it happened in today's NBA, McHale would have been fined and suspended for a few games. Mitch Kupchak is quoted about that play as saying "that was considered a very hard foul."

Unfortunately, that clip is one of the only one that was available in terms of fouls from that era.

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